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Egypt’s military council to hold 2nd meeting on Morsi’s decision

Police have surrounded the area around the parliament

Press TV – July 9, 2012

Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court is expected to decide in a meeting on President Mohamed Morsi’s order to reconvene the dissolved parliament.

Shortly after the announcement of Morsi’s order on Sunday, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) held an emergency meeting, but it did not take any concrete action.

The military authorities are set to convene once again to discuss the consequences of the decree by the newly-elected president.

The Egyptian president ordered the country’s dissolved parliament to resume its legislative work, rejecting the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court’s ruling that said the country’s parliamentary elections about 7 months ago were unconstitutional.

The Egyptian president also called for holding new parliamentary elections within 60 days of the ratification of the new constitution for the North African state.

Protests have been going on since the junta dissolved the country’s parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt’s junta also took control of the state budget and gave itself veto power on a new constitution, making the new president almost powerless through a recent constitutional declaration.

Despite Morsi’s calls for resumption of parliament’s legislative work, police have surrounded the area around the parliament , making the entrance to the parliament building almost impossible for lawmakers.

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July 9, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

FBI Prepares Billion-Dollar Iris Recognition Database

By Matt Bewig | AllGov | July 08, 2012

With at least 30 million surveillance cameras watching Americans every day, one aspect of the world of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has already come to pass, and more is on the way. In the next two years, for example, the FBI plans to test a nationwide database for searching iris scans to more quickly identify persons “of interest” to the government. The human iris, which is the doughnut-shaped, colored part of the eye that surrounds the black pupil, exhibits a pattern unique to each individual, just as fingerprints do, and iris recognition has been a staple of science fiction stories and films for years.

Iris scanning is part of the FBI’s Next-Generation Identification system, a multiyear $1 billion program built by Lockheed Martin and already well underway for several years, which will expand the FBI’s server capacity to allow for rapid matching not only of iris scans, but also of additional physical identifiers, such as fingerprints, palm prints and facial images. The FBI intends to test the system in conjunction with prisons, some of which already use iris scans to track prisoners and prevent mistakes of identification. According to the FBI, the time for urgent criminal fingerprint searches will eventually be reduced from 2 hours to 10 minutes, while the use of iris scans and other markers should ensure greater accuracy.

Although privacy advocates have little criticism of the use of iris scanning in correctional settings, the fact that the FBI and state prison officials are using a database owned and maintained by a private corporation, BI2 Technologies, gives many pause. Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, points out that privately-run databases, including well-encrypted ones at banks and other financial businesses, have experienced serious data breaches exposing private customer information, and that leaks of fingerprints or iris scans would be potentially much more serious. “You can change your credit card data. But you can’t change your biometric data.”

And in light of the fact that the New York Police Department, in cahoots with major Wall Street banks and finance firms, used security cameras to identify Occupy Wall Street protesters, suspicions that iris scans might be used to target non-criminals who are disliked by powerful cannot be dismissed out of hand.

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July 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

On Second Thought, It Is All Nader’s Fault

By Arthur Sibler | Power of Narrative | July 06, 2012

One of the more pathetically transparent and easily refuted lies told by committed Democratic tribalists is that the outcome of the 2000 election was all Ralph Nader’s fault. The more idiotic Democratic partisans will proclaim that, if only that rotten Ralph hadn’t selfishly and stupidly siphoned votes from the messianic Albert of Gore, Saint Al would have ascended to the White House on gossamer wings, the U.S. never would have gone to war in Iraq, American dependence on oil would have been swept away by the windmills of our minds, we would have rediscovered and recommitted ourselves to “true” American values (which have nothing to do with anything the U.S. has actually done, mind you, but are to be found in the record of the fantasy United States brewed in the shallower pools of the stagnant minds of these professional delusionists), the world would have been born anew — and every single one of us would have our own adorable puppy dog along with a fucking rainbow.

Except…not.

I’ve made the arguments set forth in the linked article many times myself over the years, too many times over too many years. I’m not going to make them any longer.

For all I know, Nader himself may well believe he’s the reason Gore lost. Why do I say that? Because Nader believes several massive boatloads of unmitigated shit.

I am not going to be the only person who must spend half an hour cleaning vomit from his keyboard. So please accompany me on this brief tour of the tortured byways of what passes for Nader’s mind. He begins thusly:

If the Democrats in Congress were all drinking water from the same faucet, there might be a clue to their chronic fear of the craven and cruel corporatist Republicans who dominate them.

But they don’t, so we have to ask why their fear, defeatism, and cowering behavior continues in the face of the outrageous GOP actions as the November election approaches.

Keep in mind that the purpose of Nader’s column is to “save” the Democrats from what he perceives as self-immolation. One might wonder why he believes such a desultory group of gutless, fear-ridden maggots can be “saved” at all. The only reason that he offers is that they still call themselves “Democrats.” How marvelously subtle and unexpected.

Nader’s next paragraph might erroneously lead you to believe that he intends to get to the real problem:

The explanations go back some years. The Democrats have long receded from the Harry Truman days of “give ‘em hell, Harry”. But their political castration occurred in the late seventies when the Democrats were persuaded by one of their own, Congressman Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), to start aggressively bidding for corporate campaign cash.

Ah, so perhaps the Democrats began to pursue an agenda that was notably friendly to corporate interests? But Nader immediately abandons this line of inquiry, to return to the reliable theme of irredeemably loathsome Republicans who “torture” Democrats. No wonder the poor Democrats are dominated by fear and weakness: they’re “tortured daily”!

And then we read a paragraph that reduced me to open-mouthed astonishment. Nader intends the following as an indictment of “the unpopular agendas pitched by these Wall Street puppets” — by which he means “Republican leaders.” This is the paragraph:

One would think that politicians who side with big corporations would be politically vulnerable for endangering both America and the American people. These corrupt politicians promote corporate tax loopholes and side with insurance and drug companies on costly health care proposals. They defend the corporate polluters on their unsafe workplaces, dirty air, water and contaminated food, push for more deficit spending in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, neglect Main Street based public works-repair-America-jobs programs, support high-interest student loans, cover for oil industry greed at the pump, and are hell-bent on taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beats.

There is one slight problem with this analysis: it perfectly describes the Democrats’ program. The abominable — and now constitutional! — health “care” bill was championed not by Boehner or Cantor, but by Barack Obama. The wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and on and on are prosecuted by the Obama administration. The same is true of every item in Nader’s list.

Moreover, the program of systematic assassination by secret decree is not the invention of George W. Bush, but of Barack Obama. As I have noted many times before, this program represents the assertion of absolute power. Absolute power has been claimed and is fervently supported by Democrats. For any semi-decent human being, this should kill the Democratic Party until such time as it renounces the murder program fully and repeatedly, and then acts over a period of years to demonstrate that its renunciation is genuine.

I consider it impossible that Nader just happens to miss these points. I am forced to conclude that either he is now willing to lie across the board, including on every matter of the gravest significance, or he has become the victim of his chosen self-delusions to a degree that renders his brain non-functional in any meaningful sense. See my recent post on self-made stupidity and blindness for more on the latter point.

The column is remarkably and childishly confused. Strewn among the formulaic denunciations of “extremist” Republicans is this admission: “Unfortunately, on military and foreign policy there isn’t much of a difference [between the parties]. So the bright line will have to be on domestic issues.”

But a few paragraphs later, Nader writes:

There are plenty of bright-line issues for the Democrats. Get tough on Wall Street and corporate crime, protect pensions, end the wars, tax the corporate and wealthy tax-escapees, launch community-based public works programs, provide full Medicare for all, expand health and safety programs, to name a few.

Given his own admission, why in the world does Nader include “end the wars” on this list? But it is equally delusional to believe the Democrats will adopt any of the programs he identifies. To the contrary: the Democrats have provided voluminous evidence demonstrating that they feverishly oppose all such programs.

In brief, and as I have also said many times before, the Democrats act as they do because they are pursuing the programs and goals they want to pursue. The evidence is all around us, in the mangled, bleeding bodies of countless victims abroad, and in the increasingly desperate lives of more and more Americans at home. All a person has to do is open his eyes and look at it.

This is precisely what Nader and all those who have similar beliefs refuse to do. Once again, from five goddamn years ago:

[The explanation] is very simple, and it goes to the progressives’ central articles of religious faith: The Democrats aren’t really like this, not in their heart of hearts. The Democrats don’t actually favor a repressive, authoritarian state. The Democrats are good, and they want liberty and peace for everyone, everywhere, for eternity, hallelujah and amen.

People who continue to believe this have evicted themselves from serious political debate, and they have willingly made themselves slaves to their enthusiastically embraced self-delusions. They confess a comprehensive ignorance of history, a stunning inability to understand the political developments of the last century, and a desire to place the story they have chosen, primarily because it flatters their own false sense of vanity and self-worth, above every relevant fact.

So you know what I think, Ralph? Not only do I now think it’s your fault that Gore lost the 2000 election, I think that every terrible thing that has happened in the last half century is your fault!

I also know that it’s your fault I can’t lose 20 pounds. You bastard.

From now on, when idiot Democrats blame you for what are manifestly their own failures, you can defend yourself if you choose to. Good luck with that. You’ll need it.

July 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Morsi reinstates Egypt’s dissolved lower house; SCAF holds emergency meeting

Parliament Speaker Katatni to issue statement Sunday evening

By Nada Hussein Rashwan | Ahram Online | July 8, 2012

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi issued a decision Sunday afternoon calling for the dissolved People’s Assembly (the lower house of Egypt’s parliament) to resume its legislative activities. He also called for fresh parliamentary polls to be held within 60 days of the ratification of a new national constitution.

Ahram Online’s correspondent close to the military council said that Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was currently holding an emergency meeting to discuss the surprise development.

Egypt’s military council had dissolved parliament’s freely-elected, Islamist-led lower house in mid-June, based on a High Constitutional Court (HCC) ruling that found Egypt’s parliamentary elections law – which regulated last year’s legislative polls – to be unconstitutional.

Morsi’s presidential decree, however, overturned the military council’s decision to dissolve the assembly and ordered the assembly to resume legislative activities. The president further declared that new parliamentary elections would be held within 60 days of the ratification of the country’s new national charter.

Morsi’s decision comes only one day before the HCC was scheduled to deliver a verdict on an appeal filed by members of the dissolved lower house challenging the decision to dissolve the People’s Assembly.

Mohamed El-Katatni, speaker of the parliament, will be giving a statement on the issue Sunday evening.

Only days after the dissolution of the lower house last month, the military council issued a ‘constitutional addendum’ giving the military full legislative authority until fresh parliament elections could be held.

The constitutional addendum also stipulated that new parliamentary elections be held one month after a new constitution is approved by popular referendum, expected sometime before the end of the current year.

Legal experts, meanwhile, have challenged the decision to dissolve parliament, saying that the HCC verdict only justified the dissolution of one third of the seats in the People’s Assembly.

Last week, Morsi took his oath of office before the HCC, which critics say represented the president’s tacit recognition of the controversial addendum.

July 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Thousands of Palestinians to be forced into Israeli military service

Al Akhbar | July 8, 2012

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will be forced to complete military or community service with the Israeli army, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party announced it would back a controversial plan for reforming the country’s laws.

Meeting in Jerusalem, the party said it would support the recommendations proposed by the so-called Plesner committee last week which also include forcing orthodox Jews to serve.

“The party this morning discussed and unanimously adopted the principles laid out by the Plesner commission,” Likud spokeswoman Noga Katz said in a statement.

The decision means the government will now move towards drafting a law requiring all sectors of Israeli society to complete either military or community service, with penalties to be levied on those who fail to comply.

There are around 1,500,000 pre-1948 Palestinians, who Israel refers to as Israeli Arabs, inside the Jewish state.

Netanyahu’s spokesman Ofir Gendelman later confirmed that there would be no exceptions for Palestinians, many of whom see the Israeli army as a source of oppression.

The new law will replace the so-called Tal Law, which contained national service exemptions for ultra-orthodox Jews and Palestinians, but was overturned by Israel’s High Court earlier this year.

Likud’s decision to back the recommendations of the commission appeared to head off the possibility of a coalition crisis.

The Kadima party headed by Shaul Mofaz, which joined the government in May giving Netanyahu a massive parliamentary majority, had threatened to quit the coalition over the issue of military service for all.

But after the Likud party decision, Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister and Mofaz had agreed on the formation of a panel to draft the new law.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and vice prime minister Shaul Mofaz are in agreement on the formation of a commission charged with drawing up a law on the equality of service to be presented at the next government meeting,” the statement said.

Military service is compulsory for most Israelis over the age of 18, with men serving three years and women two.

The Israeli army brutally suppresses Palestinians calling for equal rights and was recently accused of aiding fundamentalist Jewish settlers shooting Palestinian protesters.

(Al-Akhbar, AFP)

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July 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli interrogators sexually harass Palestinian children in detention

Palestine Information Center – 08/07/2012

RAMALLAH — A number of Palestinian children who were detained in different circumstances have reported their exposure to abuse and maltreatment by Israeli soldiers and interrogators.

In some cases, the interrogators sexually harassed the children and on other occasions they threatened to rape them if they did not cooperate or make certain confessions, according to the children’s testimonies.

Palestinian statistics documented the detention of more than 9,000 children during the past ten years, mostly from occupied Jerusalem and West Bank villages such as Bil’in, Ma’sarah, Kafr Qaddum, Nabi Saleh and Beit Ummar.

A child named Mohamed said an Israeli interrogator threatened to sexually harm him if he refused to confess to throwing stones at soldiers and settlers.

Samer, another child, was given the choice of working as an informer or else he would be tortured, raped and jailed on a charge of throwing a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli patrol in Azzun village near Qalqiliya city.

For his part, director of the Al-Haq organization for human rights Shawan Jabbarin said the Israeli interrogators offer to get rid of the sexual and psychological pressure inflicted on the detained Palestinian children if they will work for them.

Jabbarin noted that Israel violates all limitations for the detention of minors under age 18 as stipulated by the fourth Geneva convention.

He stressed the need for the presence of a lawyer or one of the parents during the interrogation of children to prevent violations against them and to protect their rights.

The activist appealed to the UN and human rights organizations to intervene and oblige Israel to respect international law on the rights of children and release them all from its jails.

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July 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

France’s Zionist Puppet Masters

By Vacy Vlazna | Palestine Chronicle | July 6, 2012

France, the nation whose 1789 Revolution gave the world the ideals of Equality, Fraternity and Liberty especially freedom of speech and of the press, jumps to attention (as a docile marionette does) when its Zionist manipulators such as the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism(BNCVA) the France Israel Chamber of Commerce, International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, get a whiff of criticism of Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In June, puppetmaster CRIF frantically pulled its incitement-to-hate-Israel-strings when Professor Christophe Oberlin had the temerity to light a spark of conscience and morality (important qualities for the medical profession) by setting an exam question for his students of humane medicine at Bichat Hospital Faculty of Medicine using the example of the massacre of 22 members of the Samouni family [by the Givati Brigade] during the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza “To what extent does it constitute a perpetual crime (war crime, crime against humanity, genocide crime)?”

Oberlin’s boss, the Puppet, oops, President of Diderot University, Vincent Berger shamefully apologised (for the truth) to CRIF and said an internal investigation would be mounted. Ironically, Diderot University prides itself on Denis Diderot’s humanist values and his profound respect for freedom of knowledge and thought. Diderot himself did not shy from controversy when accused of ‘publishing dangerous ideas’ and Berger’s unworthy coerced apology is at odds with Diderot’s “Every man has his dignity. I’m willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.”

Professors Mads Gilbert and Eric Fosse, Norwegian surgeons, who attended the Samouni survivors and other innocent victims of Israel’s violent Cast Lead Operation in Gaza describe in their book, ‘Eyes in Gaza’, how in April 2009, Norwegian lawyers filed charges of ‘war crimes and gross violation of international humanitarian law’ against the war on Gaza’s key Israeli political and military leaders Ehad Olmert, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Gabi Ashkenazi, Eliezer Marom, Avi Mizrahi, Ido Nehoshtan, Yoav Galant, Ilan Malka (Givati) and Avi Peled (Golani) and requesting their arrest if they go to Norway. Gilbert and Fosse’s ‘Eyes in Gaza’ details the medical challenges of treating injured civilians in the thick of the fierce Israeli bombardment and severe medical shortages and should be a mandatory text for medical students and Vincent Berger.

Another serious attack on academic independence and freedom of expression occurred in February at the Paris 8 university when a conference titled “Is Israel an apartheid state?” which included the keynote speaker, Omar Barghouti, coordinator of the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was obsequiously banned by the University president Pascal Binczak who closed the university down for 2 days after a delirium of “discrimination against a nation”-and-“incitement to hatred and violence” string-pulling by CRIF and the Simon Weisenthal Centre which warned of the threat to public order and danger to the Jewish community. This is the same Wiesenthal Centre that intolerantly desecrated the Muslim Ma’man Allah cemetery, Jerusalem to build its Museum of Tolerance. Shimon Samuels is the director of both the European Wiesenthal Center and the BNCVA.

The conference was peacefully held off-campus.

In January 2011, CRIF president, Richard Prasquier contacted the Minister of the Universities, Valerie Pécresse convincing her to cancel a BDS conference at the prestigious “l’Ecole Normale Supérieure” (ENS) in an attempt to silence Stephane Hessel, diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, former French resistance fighter, an editor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and author of Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage) in which he states, “Today, my main indignation concerns Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank…. This conflict is outrageous.”

Zionists also tried to string along the French justice system since 2010 during a series of trials against French BDS activists citing the 1972 amendments to Law of 1881 whereby racially defamatory comments and incitement to racial hatred were criminalised. CRIF has 80 cases pending trial. In 2011, the judgement from the Bobigny criminal court ruled that “incitement to discrimination could only be applied to a population or a population group, and not to a state or the products of that state.” On 17 June 2011, judges of the tribunal of the 17th magistrate’s court of the Paris law courts ruled on the right of citizens to call for a boycott of Israel and its products.

When Olivia Zemor, president of CAPJPO-EuroPalestine, was acquitted on 8 July, 2011 “the judge explained that the article of law cited by the plaintiffs (article 24, paragraph 8, Law of 1881) is designed to “fight any form of racism” and cannot be cited in order to forbid a call for boycott “suggesting a certain form of conscientious objection, which each of us is free to express or not to express” and “launched by non-governmental organisations without prerogative powers”.

Even so, the new French president Francois Hollande was quick to emulate his predecessor, the Zionist ventriloquist dummy Sarkozy, stating ” I am totally opposed to the boycott of Israeli goods, which is illegal and does not serve the cause of peace.”

Tracking Zionist interests and manipulation of the French government is a matter of following the money which ultimately leads to the Israeli arms industry and to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

France is Israel’s largest European weapons supplier which as David Cronin points out is “at variance with the Union’s decade-old code of conduct on weapons exports. Formally declared legally binding by EU governments last year, the code forbids weapons sales in cases where they may exacerbate regional tensions or where there is a strong likelihood they will be used in violation of human rights.”

Charles Edelstenne, who by the way is also a director of Carrefour, is chairman and co-founder of Dassault Aviation, a major military supplier, which has a stake in Thales, a French multinational company that turns over more than $22 billion in revenue in Aerospace, Space, Defence and Security markets annually. Heron TP aircraft are built by Dassault Aviation and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) which was founded in 1953 by Shimon Peres and is owned by the government of Israel. Le Figaro, France’s second largest national newspaper is owned by Dassault. Lagardère, a French conglomerate with defence and aviation interests, owns the Paris-Match magazine and part owner of Le Monde, Xavier Neil, is a partner of Israeli company, Golan Telecom whose controlling shareholder, Michael Golan made ‘aliyah to Israel in 2007 ‘as part of his Zionist vision’.

Former President of France, Sarkosy (as well as Blair) is a personal [acquaintance of] Bernard Arnault, Europe’s 4th richest man, who controls the luxury goods empire of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) which also owns the French cosmetics chain Sephora and has stakes in the Carrefour supermarkets and in De Beers Diamond Jewellers Limited.

Sephora operates 269 stores in France and more than 1,400 stores in 27 countries. It retails the AHAVA Dead Sea products that are produced in Israel’s illegal colonies. EI blogger, Adri Nieuwhof points out that “Ahava uses Palestinian natural resources without the permission of or compensation to the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israel denies Palestinians access to the shores of the Dead Sea and its resources, although one-third of the western shore of the Dead Sea lies in the occupied West Bank.”

French BDS activists have been targeting Carrefour supermarkets deshelving “Israeli agricultural products imported in France by the Israeli company Mehadrin, which is an essential tool for the Israeli policy of colonization of the Palestinian territories. Most of the products come from Israeli settlements, including from settlements located in the Jordan valley where 7,000 settlers have taken over 95 % of the Palestinian farmer’s lands and have ensured the control of 98 % of the water. As per international law, and in particular as per the IVth Geneva Convention, the activities of Mehadrin are criminal.”

Israeli Textile giant, Delta Galil also supplies Carrefour. It’s boss, Dov Lautman is an associate of Ehud Barak and a staunch Zionist. He a member of the Jewish Agency’s Board of Governors since June 2002 and a member of the Jewish Agency Executive. The Jewish Agency was established by the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1929. “It acts as agent of the government in assigning land to Jewish colonists” in Occupied Palestine.

From 2009 until 2011, when it hit a financial slump, Israeli billionaire Nochi Dankner’s Koor Industries Ltd held a 3% share stake in Carrefour. Former president and CEO of Strauss Group Ltd (which actively supports the vicious Golani and Givati elite brigades), Erez Vigodman joined Makhteshim Agan Group in January 2010 which is 40% owned by Danker’s Koor Industries. Maketish Agan is a pesticide factory located in the Ramat Hovav industrial zone that pollutes its environs with hazardous waste including Wadi el-Na’am, a village of more than 5,000 Bedouins. “In a 2004 study commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Health found a high rate of birth defects among children living in the vicinity. In August 2006, Ben Gurion University epidemiologist Batya Sarov, formerly a specialist at Chernobyl, compared the environmental monitoring and health risks to Chernobyl.”

Dankner is also a director of Nesher Israel Cement Enterprises, Israel’s sole cement producer, which supplies construction materials to Israeli companies building the illegal Annexation Wall and ‘products of Nesher were seen in construction sites in West Bank settlements and in the construction of the light rail project in Jerusalem, which connects the settlement neighbourhoods of the city with the city center.’

In 2007 Jonathan Kolber, Koor Industries chairman and former director of Makhteshim, who is also on the board of directors of Elbit (Israel’s largest defence firm specialising in drones ad surveillance), invested in Eyeblaster along with BRM Capital managing director Eli Barkat. Eli’s bother, Nir was a founder of BRM. Nir Barkat, as mayor of Jerusalem drives the judaisation of occupied Jerusalem through ethnic cleansing, home demolitions and illegal colony construction.

LVMH also has the jewellery lines of TAG Heuer, Chaumet, Christian Dior Montres, Zenith, Fred, Hublot, including the joint-venture De Beers Diamond Jewellers Limited. In 2012 Nicky Oppenheimer sold the family’s 40% stake in De Beers after its long and lucrative relationship with Israel’s diamond industry which still continues.

Patrick Galey, in his article “Israeli Blood Diamonds: The Global Coverup’ reveals the close connection between the Israeli diamond industry and the Israeli military. ” Israeli economist Shir Hever, in evidence given at 2010’s Russell Tribunal on Palestine, said that it was the Israeli Defense Forces, among other organizations, that most benefited from Israel’s lucrative diamond business.”

“Overall the Israeli diamond industry contributes about $1 billion annually to the Israeli military and security industries,” Hever told the Tribunal. “Every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel some of that money ends up in the Israeli military, so the financial connection is quite clear.”

“That is not counting the private diamond revenue that goes to the Israeli Army. Steinmetz, [a buyer of rough diamonds from De Beers] one of the world’s leading diamond producers, owns a charitable foundation that has “adopted” a unit in the Israeli Army. The diamond giant is funding the notorious Givati Brigade, responsible for one of the worst atrocities perpetrated on the people of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead” i.e.. the Samouni massacre.

Zionist puppeteers ensure that the French government protects its interests in Israel. For all the financial loss of billions of dollars, due in part to the successful BDS campaign against it, the massive debt of Veolia Environnement, a multinational French company which is heavily implicated in Israel’s apartheid framework, is being propped up by tax monies by the French government through Caisse des Dépôts (CDC), a public investment authority that manages public funds. Veolia built the Jews-only Light Rail Project in Jerusalem and provides Jews-only bus services along the Jews-only Highway 443 for illegal colonists to the illegal colonies built on stolen Palestinian land in Occupied Palestine.

Little wonder then, in April, that Zionist interests in France could pull strings to prevent 100 Flytilla activist from leaving France when Air France refused to embark passengers marked on Israel’s blacklists. A French woman was taken off an Air France plane when she failed to declare herself an Israeli or a Jew. The French government went as far as urging its citizens not to take part in the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ campaign which simply requested participants to openly state to Israel authorities their intention to travel to Occupied Palestine.

Despite French attitudes that show 20% are positive towards Israel and 65% are negative (BBC Poll), France manifests as a puppet regime of global Zionism surrendering the civil liberties of its citizens, the academic freedom and independence of its universities, and its binding responsibilities to uphold international law noteably the Geneva Conventions which protect Palestinian human rights. It is the determined and principled actions of French activists, withstanding Zionist antisemitism hysteria, who uphold the tattered motto of France- liberté, égalité, fraternité.

– Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters.

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July 7, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

No Accountability Yet for Toronto G20 Police Crimes

TheRealNews | July 5, 2012

“Paul Jay: Until police and their political masters are held responsible under the criminal code, it can all happen again.”

July 7, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Argentine court hands down jail terms over stolen babies

DW | July 5, 2012

An Argentine court has sentenced former dictator Jorge Videla to 50 years in jail for stealing babies from political prisoners. There were also heavy penalties for others involved in the practice.

Videla was sentenced at Argentina’s Federal Oral Tribunal Court on Thursday, along with other former officials from the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship.

The court ruled that Videla was guilty of systematically executing a plan in which infants were taken from detainees who had been kidnapped, tortured and killed by the regime.

While Videla was given a 50-year sentence, the country’s last dictator General Reynaldo Bignone received a 15-year-term. Both men were already serving sentences for other human rights abuses.

Hundreds cheered the ruling, which was broadcast on a giant television screen outside the courthouse.

Nine other defendants were jailed for between 15 and 40 years because of their roles in the practice.

Rights campaign group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo has fought a legal battle calling for justice for the stolen children since 1996. It claimed 500 babies were taken and subsequently raised by families close to the regime.

Dirty war cover-up

According to the evidence, Bignone had been urged to reveal the identities of the stolen babies as part of the country’s transition to democracy. Instead, the court heard, he had ordered a cover-up.

The junta’s “dirty war” on leftist dissidents eventually claimed 13,000 victims according to official records – including pregnant women who were forced to give birth inside torture centers. Rights groups place the number at closer to 30,000.

The 35 abductions dealt with in the court case took place at the Argentine Marine School of Engineering, ESMA, in Buenos Aires.

Survivors who testified said that inmates gave birth while shackled and hooded and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, were never allowed to see their babies.

In most cases babies were given to soldiers or friends of the military, while the mothers were thrown into the sea from military planes in what were known as “death flights.”

rc/ch (AFP, AP, dpa)

July 6, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli occupation authorities renew MP Omar Abdel Razek’s administrative detention

Palestine Information Center – 06/07/2012

RAMALLAH — Israeli occupation authorities renewed the administrative detention of the MP for the district of Salfit Dr. Omar Abdel Razek for six months for the third time in a row and three days before his release.

Ahrar center for prisoner studies and human rights denounced the renewal decision, where the Centre’s Director, Fouad Khuffash, told PIC that Razek was arrested in 2011 without charge or trial, and that he spent more than four years in occupation prisons after he was elected as a member of the legislative Council and during his time as Palestinian Minister of Finance.

The former lecturer at al-Najah university, Razek’s administrative detention has been renewed for three times, in addition to the arrest of his son Mohammed, a student at al-Najeh University, without trial or charge at Megiddo prison few days before his final exams.

Furthermore, the occupation has also arrested his daughter’s fiancé 22 days ago, just one month before his wedding.

Ahrar center quoted the detainee’s wife as saying that the prison administration prevented her and the detainee’s mother from visiting him under security pretexts.

Um Said, the prisoner’s wife, urged human rights organizations and members of legislative assemblies in the world to intervene immediately and urgently for the release of her husband and all the Palestinian MPs.

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July 6, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report

By J. Brad Hicks | April 15th, 2012

You know how every time somebody in law enforcement does something that looks bad, we’re told that we should “wait until the facts are in” before passing judgment? Well, after Lieutenant Pike of the UC Davis Police Department became an internet meme by using high-pressure pepper-spray on peaceful resisters, the campus hired an independent consulting firm to interview everybody they could find, review all the videos and other evidence, review the relevant policies and laws, and issue a final fact-finding report to the university. The university just released that report, along with their summary (PDF link), and the final report is even worse than the news accounts made it seem.

You probably weren’t aware that the protesters warned the university that they were going to be protesting two weeks in advance, were you? The campus, and campus police, had two weeks’ notice to plan for this, and yes, on day one, one question they addressed was, “What if the protesters set up an Occupy encampment?” Two weeks in advance they planned, well, if they do that, then we’ll send in police to remove the tents, and to arrest anybody who tries to stop them. Now, under California law, when planning an operation like this, there’s a checklist they’re supposed to follow when writing the operational plan, specifically to make sure that they don’t forget something important. Had they done so? They would have avoided all four of the important steps they screwed up. When asked about it? Nobody involved was even aware that that checklist existed.

The most important thing that the checklist would have warned them about was do not screw up the chain of command. Let me make clear who was in the chain of command. Under normal circumstances, it runs from university Chancellor Katehi, to campus police Chief Spicuzza, to campus police Lieutenant Davis, to his officers, including one I’ll call Officer Nameless. (The report refers to him by a code letter.) Once the cops arrive on the scene, there’s supposed to be one and only one person in a position to give orders to the other officers on the scene, including any higher-ups who are there (if any). Officer Nameless, who wrote the plan, was put in charge of the scene by Lt. Pike. By law, the officer in charge of the scene is not supposed to get directly involved. He or she (in this case, he) is supposed to stand back where he can see the whole scene, and concentrate on giving orders, and everybody else is supposed to refrain from giving orders. Officer Nameless instead ignored his responsibilities, and waded in, and so did Lt. Pike; Chief Spicuzza sat in her car half a block away, communicating with the radio dispatcher by cell phone, and at one time or another, all three of them, Officer Nameless and Lieutenant Pike and Chief Spicuzza were yelling out contradictory orders.

But before it even came to that point, the student protesters had, with the help of Legal Services, gone over all the relevant state laws, city ordinances, campus ordinances, and campus regulations and concluded that no matter what the Chancellor thought, it was entirely legal for them to set up that camp. When the university’s legal department found out that Chancellor Katehi was going to order the camp removed, they thought they made it clear to her that the students were right.

I kept having to stop and slap my forehead over that one repeated phrase in the report: (this person or that) was under the impression she had made it clear that (some order was given), but nobody else present had that impression. Anybody who is “under the impression that they made it clear” that some order was given who who didn’t put it in writing and who hasn’t had that order paraphrased back to them? Should be slapped. Or at the very least demoted. Unless you actually said it, you didn’t “make it clear.”

It turns out that it is illegal for anybody to lodge on the campus without permission, but the relevant law only applies to people trying to make it their permanent dwelling. The law prohibits non-students from camping on campus for any reason, but neither student affairs nor the one cop sent to look could find any non-students who were there overnight. A campus regulation says that students can’t set up tents without permission, but that regulation is not enforceable by police, only by academic discipline. Campus legal “thought they made it clear” that the law was on the students’ side, but according to multiple witnesses, what they actually said was “it is unclear that you have legal authority to order the police to do this” and Chancellor Katehi heard that as “well, they didn’t say I don’t have that authority, only that it’s not clear.”

Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.”

Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use. It turns out that the relevant law only permits the use of up to Mk-4 pepper sprayers. The consultants were unable to find out who authorized the purchase and carrying, but every cop they asked said, “So what? It’s just like the Mk-4 except that it has a higher capacity.” Uh, no. It’s also much, much higher pressure, and specifically designed not to be sprayed directly at any one person, only at crowds, and only from at least six feet away. The manufacturer says so. The person in charge of training California police in pepper spray says that as far as he knows, no California cop has ever received training, from his office or from the manufacturer, in how to safely use a Mk-9 sprayer, presumably because it’s illegal. But Officer Nameless, when he wrote the action plan for these arrests, included all pepper-spray equipment in the equipment list, both the paint-ball rifle pepper balls and the Mk-9 riot-control sprayers.

The students set up their tents on a Thursday night. Chancellor Katehi ordered the cops to (a) only involve campus police, because she didn’t trust the local cops not to be excessively brutal, and (b) get them out of here by 3 AM Thursday night. Chief Spicuzza had to tell her that that wasn’t physically possible, they couldn’t get enough backup officers from other UC campuses on that short notice, it was going to have to be Friday night at 3 AM. Chancellor Katehi said “no can do,” that they had to be out of there before sunset Friday night, so that the camp wasn’t joined by drunken and stoned Friday night partiers that would endanger the camp and even further endanger cops trying to deal with them — arguably an entirely reasonable objection. So she ordered Chief Spicuzza to get them out of there by 3 PM Friday afternoon. Chief Spicuzza “was under the impression” (oh, look, there’s that phrase again) that she made it clear to the Chancellor that for one thing, it couldn’t be safely done, at 3:00 PM the protesters and passers-by would way outnumber her officers, and for another, it couldn’t be legally done, because there was no way to legally arrest someone for “overnight camping” in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody else who was in that meeting thinks she made that clear, only that she made it clear that she didn’t want to do it but couldn’t explain why not. Still, when she gave the order to Lieutenant Pike, he very definitely did raise the same objections, clearly and unambiguously, backed up by multiple witnesses, who all agree that Chief Spicuzza told him, “This was decided above my level, do it anyway.”

So, there’s Lieutenant Pike. (Who, by the way, for obvious legal reasons since he’s still being investigated by internal affairs and, last I heard, still being sued by his victims, refused to be interviewed by the consultants, so everything we know about his side of this comes from what he told other people and what he wrote in his reports.) As far as he’s concerned, he’s been given an illegal and impossible order: take 40 or so officers – unarmed and unarmored officers – into an angry crowd of 300 to 400 people who aren’t doing anything illegal and make that crowd go away without using any force or getting any of your officers injured. For reasons Stanley Milgram could explain, it does not occur to Lieutenant Pike to disobey this order, so instead, he does the best he can, using his own judgement to decide which parts of his orders and which parts of the law to ignore. Unsurprisingly, it goes badly. Backed into a corner by an angry crowd (which has, by the way, demonstrably left him room to retreat, even with his prisoners, contrary to what he says in his report) that is confronting him with evidence that he is the law-breaker here, not them, he snaps. And rather than take it out on the more-powerful people who put him in this situation, he takes it out on the powerless and peaceful people in front of him, using a high-pressure hose to pump five gallons of capsacin spray into the eyes and mouths of the dozen or twenty people in front of him … and he would have used more if he’d had it, he only stopped when he did, halfway through his third pass down the line, because the sprayer emptied. When he gets back to the station, Chief Spicuzza (who has no idea what’s just happened) congratulates him in front of half the department for how well he just did. And now, as far as he’s concerned, he’s being hung out to dry. We’re apparently supposed to ignore the fact that multiple video sources contradict almost everything about his after-incident report because apparently, in his opinion, he was only following orders.

This is not better than the initial media reports. This is worse. This is an epic textbook in official-violence failure.

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July 5, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel convicts journalist for disclosing assassinations

Al Akhbar | July 5, 2012

An Israeli journalist who drew on leaked army documents to report the deliberate assassinations of Palestinian leaders was convicted on Thursday, but spared jail time in a plea bargain.

Uri Blau of Haaretz newspaper will do four months community service after confessing to reduced charges of possessing classified information without authorization but “with no intent to harm national security,” Israel’s State Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

Prosecutors had earlier stated Blau could face more serious espionage charges. That provoked protests from journalists who argued Israel’s reputation for media freedom was at stake.

Blau reported in 2008 that top army officers in the occupied West Bank had given shoot-to-kill orders to troops chasing Palestinian gunmen.

The front-page story was based on documents given to Blau by former army conscript Anat Kamm, who had downloaded them, and hundreds of others, from her computer while a clerk with the military’s high command.

Kamm was jailed for four and a half years in October under a separate plea bargain.

Human rights groups have criticized Israel’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders since the early days of a Palestinian uprising in 2000.

Haaretz said charging Blau was “unfortunate and sets a precedent in terms of its ramifications on the freedom of press in Israel, and especially on the ability to cover the security apparatus.” Other Israeli journalists echoed the condemnation.

Blau’s plea bargain is subject to formal approval by Tel Aviv District Court.

A recent Reporters Without Borders study ranked Israel 92nd out of 179 countries in terms of press freedom, behind countries such as Congo, Kenya and Serbia.

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July 5, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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